Race and class were never mentioned in the 274 pages of emails related to Flint’s water crisis released earlier this week by Governor Rick Snyder’s office, but civil rights advocates see a correlation.
Photograph: Ryan Garza/AP

Michigan’s embattled governor, Rick Snyder, declared on Friday morning that despite assertions to the contrary, the Flint water crisis is “absolutely not” a case of environmental racism.

In an interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, the Republican governor acknowledged “major failures” on the part of the state’s government in addressing the lead contamination that has poisoned thousands of residents of Flint, Michigan, but strongly resisted charges that racism was one of those failures.

“I’ve made a focused effort since before I started in office to say we need to work hard to help people that have the greatest need,” Snyder said. “This was a terrible tragedy. These people work for me. And that’s why it was important to accept responsibility, and my focus is on fixing this problem.”

Although race and class are never mentioned in the 274 pages of emails related to Flint’s water crisis released earlier this week by Snyder’s office, Flint residents and civil rights advocates have linked the government’s slow response to the crisis to environmental racism, a term that refers to the proven correlation between the racial, ethnic and class backgrounds of an area’s residents and proximity to hazardous waste. Flint is a majority-black city where more than 40% of residents live below the poverty line.

Instead, Snyder pinned the water crisis on failures by “quote-unquote experts” to provide regulatory agencies with “the right information”.

“That’s a huge bureaucratic problem, and it’s part of the problem with culture in government,” Snyder said. “This is something that we don’t consider just what one person did. Let’s look at the entire cultural background of how people have been operating. Let’s get in there and rebuild a culture that understands. Common sense needs to be part of it. Taking care of our citizens needs to be part of it. That’s [of] paramount importance when you’re talking about the safety of our citizens.”

Snyder’s assertion that state agencies were denied accurate information runs counter to the findings of the Flint Water Advisory Task Force, which released a preliminary report in December 2015 laying ultimate blame for the water crisis at the feet of the Michigan department of environmental quality (MDEQ). According to the task force’s report, the MDEQ’s Office of Drinking Water and Municipal Assistance adopted a “minimalist approach to regulatory and oversight responsibility”.

The taskforce also found that “throughout 2015, as the public raised concerns and as independent studies and testing were conducted and brought to the attention of MDEQ, the agency’s response was often one of aggressive dismissal, belittlement, and attempts to discredit these efforts and the individuals involved. We find both the tone and substance of many MDEQ public statements to be completely unacceptable.”

The taskforce’s findings prompted the resignation of the MDEQ’s director, Dan Wyant, who, like Flint’s city manager at the time, was appointed to the position by Snyder.

The lead contamination of Flint’s municipal water supply began in 2014, with the cost-cutting decision by the city’s emergency manager to switch the city’s water source from Lake Huron to the Flint river. The river water corroded the lining of the city’s ageing service lines, which then leached dangerously high levels of lead into Flint’s drinking water over the span of more than a year. Lead levels have reached 13,200 parts per billion in some homes; Environmental Protection Agency regulations require federal action at levels above 15 parts per billion.